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50 Years After March, Views of Fitful Progress

After attending the March on Washington in 1963, Daniel R. Smith wondered if the nation's mind-set would change.Credit
Christopher Gregory/The New York Times

WASHINGTON — When Daniel R. Smith was born dirt poor more than three-quarters of a century ago, there were only about 20 other blacks in his small Connecticut town. His own father had been born a slave in Virginia in 1862. Mr. Smith served as a medic in Korea in the years just after the Army had been desegregated.

And in August 1963, he found himself standing beside the Reflecting Pool with tens of thousands of others listening to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. deliver one of the most famous speeches in American history.

“I felt that this was the beginning of a new era for black Americans, that whites would respect blacks more,” said Mr. Smith, whose story exemplifies the journey of millions of black Americans. “From then on, I thought, America is America, it has become what the Constitution stands for.”

This week, he intends to join the thousands of others at events commemorating the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. But what is often on Mr. Smith’s mind, as it is on the minds of others who attended and watched the historic event, is what has happened in the five decades since Dr. King detailed his vision of a society in which people are judged by the content of their character, not the color of their skin.

Energized by his experience at the march, Mr. Smith headed to the Deep South to study veterinary medicine at what was then the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, but drifted into civil rights work and marched from Selma to Montgomery with Dr. King in 1965. He ran anti-poverty and literacy programs in the poorest corners of Alabama, having his share of scrapes along the way, before returning to work for the federal government and settling in Washington.

And now, five decades after the march, Mr. Smith, 81, lives on a leafy street in a diverse neighborhood in Northwest Washington with his second wife, who is white.

Certainly it is a different-looking society compared with 1963. A black man is president, for one thing, and young people in minority groups have an array of opportunities that their parents were limited to dreaming about.

“When you look at the places that were typically occupied by people who were not racial minorities, whether it’s the legal profession or the medical profession or major companies, there are now racial minorities in those places,” said Christopher Bracey, a law professor at George Washington University who writes on constitutional law and civil rights. “The changes are tangible. You can see it everywhere. Yes, there are still disparities, but there is no doubt there has been progress.”

A New York Times comparison of census data from 1960 and 2011 shows that 56 percent of black Americans lived below the poverty line around the time of the march, compared with 18 percent of whites. By 2011, the number had dropped to 28 percent for blacks, though the percentage was still double that for white Americans.

A separate report by the Census Bureau, released this week, showed that the percentage of blacks who graduated from high school jumped to 85 percent in 2012, from 25.7 percent in 1964, while the number of black Americans with at least a bachelor’s degree rose to 5.1 million from 365,000.

And the outcome is clear in the types of jobs that black Americans now hold. The percentage of blacks working in executive, administrative or managerial positions, for instance, went to more than 8 percent in 2011, from a little over 1 percent in 1960.

Photo

On Aug. 28, 1963, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. addressed thousands of people gathered around the Reflecting Pool on the National Mall in Washington.Credit
Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

But there have been other changes, particularly in black family life, that are not so clearly positive. The percentage of blacks who had never married rose to 49 percent in 2011, from 23 percent in 1963, a jump that far outstrips the rise in that category among whites. Black households headed by a woman jumped by nearly 12 percentage points at a time when similar households for whites rose just under 4 percentage points.

“If people could be disabused of the notion we are in a postracial society because America elected a black president, that would be helpful,” said Joyce Ladner, who at 19 worked with the small crew that organized the 1963 march and is now a retired sociologist. “Yeah, we have a black president, however look at all of these things that are still unjust, all of these problems that still exist.”

Mr. Smith, who in 1963 was a social worker at Norwich State Hospital in Connecticut, had no intention of going to the march. There had been too many dire warnings in the news media and from political figures that the event might easily dissolve into violence.

“I was really reluctant to go down and get gassed and get beat up,” Mr. Smith said. But a white colleague at the hospital talked him into it. “And so we drove down, with a lot of trepidation,” he said.

Many of those who attended and studied the event say that the march that has passed into history does not exactly match the reality. Dr. King’s vision of a nonracial society, which has been embraced in subsequent years by leaders of both major political parties, was just one face of the march, which focused just as much on issues of employment and economic equality.

“There is a reason Dr. King is invoked by both conservatives and liberals,” Professor Bracey said. “For conservatives, it’s because of his rhetoric about colorblindness. To liberals, what is attractive is that he did speak directly to a substantive, progressive, racial justice agenda.”

As they approached Washington the evening before the march, Mr. Smith and his friend noticed the gathering flotilla of buses and cars converging on the nation’s capital.

“I remember coming into the city and driving down New York Avenue and, frankly, we were lost,” Mr. Smith said. “Suddenly, a policeman on a motorcycle pulled us over. We told ourselves to stay calm.”

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The white policeman asked where they were going. To the march, they said. O.K., he said, follow me. “And he gave us an escort all the way in,” Mr. Smith said. “He asked if we had a place to stay and we said no and he said, well, I can take you to a place.”

And that is how Mr. Smith and his friend ended up among 20 other people in sleeping bags on the third floor of a white family’s Washington home, emerging the next morning to join the growing throngs headed to the Mall.

“It was just like ants,” he said. “I was struck by the nuns, and the priests in their white collars. It wasn’t just black people. It was like all of America was there.”

What is troubling to some who lived through that era is the way the march and Dr. King’s speech have become romanticized, as if the march had been a kind of love-in, solving America’s racial problems on a golden wave of eloquence.

“This is the way we have constructed our mythology,” said Daniel Serwer, a professor at Johns Hopkins who as a white high school student in New Rochelle, N.Y., decided to join a bus caravan to the march. “It was that one day in 1963, America decided segregation was wrong and got rid of it. But that’s not what happened. It was a really ugly battle for years.”

Photo

Daniel R. Smith said he had high hopes after the 1963 March on Washington: “I felt that this was the beginning of a new era for black Americans, that whites would respect blacks more.”Credit
Christopher Gregory/The New York Times

Lonnie G. Bunch III, director of the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, stood before a photograph from an exhibit on the march of a young couple dangling their feet in the Reflecting Pool — one white and one black.

“I thought this was the great image that personified the transformative nature of the march,” Mr. Bunch said. “This is the future we saw in the spirit of that day.”

Sometimes, Mr. Bunch said, he comes to watch the people as they tour the exhibit, to see what catches their eye or read what they write in the visitors’ book.

“You see a lot of older folks show the exhibit to their children and grandchildren,” Mr. Bunch said. “Young people today, those who were not alive in those years, what they know is about the speech. They don’t really know the march.”

Despite the warnings of violence, there was not even a whisper of it the day of the march. Instead, Mr. Smith said, a “festive” atmosphere dominated.

“People were in the trees, wading in the pool,” he said. “They were talking, shaking hands, meeting people. Men would carry young kids on their shoulders. Everyone was friendly.”

Mr. Smith’s father, a janitor at a clock shop in Winsted, Conn., northwest of Hartford, was 70 years old when Daniel was born in 1932. He died in a car accident when Daniel was 6, leaving his wife, 40 years his junior, to raise six children.

With the help of three surrogate fathers — all local white men who took an interest in the young man, including a veterinarian who gave him a job and a lifelong interest in animals — Mr. Smith graduated from high school and earned a degree at Springfield College in Massachusetts.

He was drafted into the newly desegregated Army but found that racism remained. When he tried to sign up for the Army’s K-9 Corps, his commander told him, “They aren’t taking any colored soldiers.”

As a civil rights worker, he was chased down a rural highway by a carload of white men who repeatedly smashed into his bumper and yelled at him to pull over. “If they’d have caught me, I’d have been dead,” Mr. Smith said.

So, Mr. Smith says, he is well aware how much difference the 1963 march made in race relations and in the lives of black Americans.

“One tendency is to say, well, the march was about affirming the moral rightness of racial equality, and that was totally done so it was a great success,” Professor Jones said. “The other is to say, no, we still have racial and economic inequality, and it’s actually increasing, so the march was a total failure. I actually tend to come down on the side of thinking that a lot of the goals of the march were realized.”

“It’s like you run a race and you hit a wall and you have to work with yourself to get past the wall,” he said. “That’s what happened to America. We made great progress and then we hit a wall and the wall started to push back and America just has not pushed through that wall yet.”

Correction: August 28, 2013

An article on Saturday about the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington misidentified the state in which Daniel R. Smith, who attended the 1963 march, worked on the civil rights and antipoverty movements in the 1960s. It was Alabama, not Mississippi. The article also misidentified the location of his home in Washington. It is in Northwest Washington, not in Northeast Washington.

A version of this article appears in print on August 24, 2013, on Page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: 50 Years After March, Views of Fitful Progress. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe